$80m raised and a few odd decisions... CAI and NLP 008
Kane Simms
??Triple Award-Winning AI Transformation Consultancy ?? VUX. helps businesses leverage AI… Properly.
Lots happened over the last 7 days. Some epic conversations had on the VUX World Live podcast and soooooo much news.
Let's get into it.
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Presented by?Deepgram; industry-leading Automatic Speech Recognition, and?Symbl.ai; conversational intelligence for developers.
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Funding
Things must be going well for Capacity, with a 124% increase in annual recurring revenue, Capacity has found its feet more recently by automating customer support questions related to mortgages and mortgage enquiries.
"Spectrum’s platform detects and responds to dangerous and offensive text and voice comments in real-time as a way for online communities to build trust and ensure the safety of their members."
Find out more about Lucy AI by listening to CEO Dan Mallin on the VUX World podcast
Partnerships and deals
Genesys have a deep partnership with Microsoft for its cloud solution, as it can be hosted on Azure. Perhaps this is a sign of Microsoft's influence and one of the benefits of Microsoft owning Nuance? Not that Nuance couldn't have established this partnership on its own (which it may well have done), but it's interesting to wonder.
It's also a potential sign that Microsoft might not have plans to strip Nuance of its technology to absorb it all into the Azure Cloud. Even if the purchase of Nuance goes through, which it probably will, you have to think that?an exercise like this would be a bit pointless if Nuance wasn't sticking around in its current form at least for a little while longer.
Anyway, it's nice to see that Genesys customers can now do some of the things that its competition has been doing for a little while, namely NICE. Voice biometrics. Making this more accessible to business users is a huge win.
It's technology that many need and want, but either couldn't justify or didn't have the expertise in previously. Being able to utilise it from within your contact centre directly reduces the barrier to adoption and makes this tooling more accessible, which you'd like to think would increase usage across the board.
The partnership will enable Verloop.io customers to deploy their conversational AI applications into new channels by leveraging Vonage's communications APIs.?
The partnership will allow Verloop.io to manage multiple channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Voice and SMS from a single platform.?
"Cerence is embedding its voice AI in the Norwegian version of Chinese electric car manufacturer NIO’s ES8 model. The international roll-out of the full-size SUV includes the company’s NOMI voice assistant, adapted by Cerence for its platform and speaking English and Norweigian."
What's interesting about this announcement is that Jaguar Land Rover was an early investor in Mycroft, the open source voice assistant. While Jaguar Land Rover has demonstrated the integration of Mycroft into its vehicles in the past, this announcement would raise a few questions regarding the future of its assistant strategy.
Use cases
SpinCar's Sales AI is aimed at automotive dealerships and uses a conversational AI sitting behind emails and text messages to respond to sales queries, take leads, manage follow-ups, book appointments and send reminders of up-and-coming appointments. It integrates into CRM systems and is hyper-focused on serving the RV, Powersports, Commercial Trucking, Machinery & Heavy Equipment and Marine market.
No data was shared into the actual effectiveness of this solution in the press release, so technically, the jury is still out. However, if it does what it says on the tin, then it could increase support hours to 24 hours a day and help fill a labour shortage gap.
NICE has released NEVA (NICE Employee Virtual Assistant) to help debt collection companies comply with new legislation in the US.
The legislation is there to protect debtors from being harassed or unfairly treated by debt collection companies.
The assistant monitors agent activity in real time and searches for cues that could mean there's a risk of violating the new rules, such as monitoring heated exchanges on calls and reminding agents of compliance requirements. It detects voicemails on outbound diallers and tracks whether a case has passed a certain time period for legal action to be taken in real time.
It’s a great example of how technology can be used to uphold legal requirements, meaning compliance is built into the business process as a default. It’s also a great example of how a combination of voice technology and process automation can work with people to give them superpowers, rather than replace jobs.
You’ll be able to use your voice to control physical meeting rooms. Something Amazon had a stab at with Alexa for Business but didn’t quite make a success of.
Now Microsoft is having a stab at the same use cases like starting calls and adjusting room settings.
The piece from Tech Radar takes a surprisingly cynical view on this:
“Fortunately though, IT admins will be able to adjust this setting to disable voice activation”.
Not quite sure why. Is voice still a gimmick? Is employee-facing voice AI not ready for wider acceptance? I'd have thought we've moved past that phase by now, but perhaps not.
领英推荐
Anyone reading that headline would think that 'voice commands for typing' is basic dictation, but no. It’s actually voice-enabled key selection. As in, press A, press B and press C. It's basically using your voice to type, one key at a time.
I've never known anything so pointless. Why not just enable dictation?
Even the accessibility angle I don’t think quite works here. Surely it is easier to speak than it is to think about what numbers correspond to which letter and then say each number individually? Even if you have impaired speech, would this solution really work for you? I'm not so sure.
Am I missing something or is this as silly as it seems?
Research
News
The EU has just wrapped up an antitrust enquiry into voice assistants and large tech monopolies with gated infrastructure, engineered to keep consumers within the walls of the platform. The recommendations are that there's no alternative to regulating these platforms because fines aren't enough to tackle something to systemic and widespread.
What that means in practice, we'll see.
Wunderman Thompson published its always anticipated future trends 2022 report that features 100 trends for 2022. Not surprisingly, blockchain, the metaverse and NFTs are all over it. There's also quite a few mentioned of AI and digital humans.
Amazon Alexa went down in Europe. Certainly impacted my son’s breakfast Paw Patrol viewings.
A startup that’s creating the worlds first voice-first NFT movement has been found to have ‘stolen’ one of the voices it used for its NFT.
NFTs (non fungible tokens) are one of a kind, original creations that don’t exist anywhere else. Voiceverse launched a bunch of NFTs, which were small animated video clips of cartoon characters speaking. For these to be classed as an NFT, they need to have been created from the ground-up as original pieces of content. One of the video NFTs Voiceverse created was found to have been using a TTS voice which was created by 15ai. Not ideal.
Knowledge
Exploring AI conversational intelligence with Surbhi Rathore, CEO, Symbl.ai
Finding and using data that you didn’t even know existed to improve customer experience and business operations.
Drastically improving chatbot performance with Benoit Alvarez, CTO, QBox
Most chatbots are pants. There’s one way to improve them tremendously, and this is it.
Coming up this week
We're chatting to Cognigy CEO, Philipp Heltewig, about the lessons businesses need to learn when they begin to scale their conversational AI and automation efforts.
We're also chatting to Engati's Imtiaz Bellary, SVP, Product & Customers, about the effective use of conversational AI for retail.
Bring on conversational commerce.
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VUX World is the front door to the world of AI-powered customer experience, helping business leaders and teams understand why voice, conversational AI and NLP technologies are revolutionising how we live, work and get things done.
We help executives formulate the future of customer experience strategies and guide teams in designing, building and implementing revolutionary products and services built on emerging AI and NLP technologies.
??Useful ????˙
Head of Digital CX & AI | Product Manager | Customer Self-Service | Conversational AI Evangelist
2 年Wow, that is some big news for the market. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/magnusrevang_ai-chatbot-virtualassistant-activity-6891684816853495808-8k_H
Principal Product Manager, AI & Search
2 年The Microsoft voice-enabled typing isn't as silly as it may sound. Speaking words is easier, sure, but think about work done in, say, Excel. There's a whole lot of non-text based keyboard interaction that happens there to be productive: cutting and pasting, navigating, shortcuts... And maybe Excel has voice navigation built-in through the ribbon (not sure if it does), but think about, say, a web developer in a text editor. Probably easy enough to bring up the menu, and then speak the command, but a lot faster to say "Alt F Two" instead.
Great notes Kane.
Busy January!!!!